


Making Peace

by RBennet



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Baelish is a creeper but damn I would, F/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Sansa Owning it, YAS QUEEN
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 17:34:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7277404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RBennet/pseuds/RBennet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We only make peace with our enemies, my lord. That's why it is called 'making peace.'"</p><p>It is no longer enough to survive and suffer at the hands of others. It is time for Sansa to play the game.</p><p>And she has learned from the best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making Peace

**Author's Note:**

> I know this will probably be AU come Sunday but that appears to be taking to long. 
> 
> This pairing is my kind of weird.

"No one can protect me. No one can protect anyone."

Those were the words she chose to leave with Jon the night before the battle. And as she watched pain and shock and heartbreak flicker across his face like signal fires in the night, she felt nothing but pity. True, he was the closest thing now to a brother that she would ever get, for Rickon was lost – as much a fact then, before the battle, as now when his corpse laid punctured with arrows in the crypt. It was a disturbing mockery of the days before when her mother would scold her for leaving her pin cushions around the castle; her baby brother was drawn to them like a magpie to trinkets and often prick his tiny, pink fingers in his eagerness to grasp his prize.

It was a moment of weakness (moments she could ill afford to have any more) she had been so very close to revealing her plea to Petyr to rally the Knights of the Vale and ride to Winterfell. The desperation in the war meeting had been palpable and the careful tactics of the battle would only hold true if Jon Snow could resist Ramsay's games.

For Sansa's plan to work it wasn't necessary for all of their men to perish in the snow, only that they be on their way to defeat when Littlefinger's army arrived to save the day. That would be all it would take to swing the fates in her favour. 

But she knew Jon, so much like their father, emotional (weak) and honourable (stupid) and her own scars knew Ramsay's twisted soul.

Sansa knew, as true as the Stark words, that her half-brother would charge straight into the bastard's slobbering jaws with his ragged band of men and free folk and likely never return. But if she had learned one thing at the hands of her husbands, captors and tormentors, it was how to play this game. So she walked away from the tent last night, through the freshly falling snow, and tightened the vice on her bleeding heart.

Now, the snow fell again in fragile, dancing drifts, the blood red leaves of the weirwood harsh against the white sky, like so many oozing bodies on a frozen battle field. Jon had lived, so had dozens of others and this should have brought her more joy than she felt sat alone in the godswood. 

Sansa wrapped her cloak around her body like the walls of Winterfell itself, a curtain of stone and mortar to protect her from enemies. There was once a time when those high, grey walls were as much a comfort to her as her mother's warm embrace. Then they became her prison cell, her torture chamber; impossibly high and fortified, threatening to suffocate the very life from her. Now, like most days, she felt nothing but a heavy numbness that had nothing to do with the cold air of the North.

Sansa flexed her fisted fingers within her gloves, the joints sore from clenching tight around the reins of her horse and the necks of imaginary corpses. Her husband was dead. She was a free woman. Dead. Free. Was there a difference?

Perhaps she should have prolonged the pain, and torn into him with her own claws and teeth – she was the daughter of a wolf after all. Perhaps she should have fitted a sharpened stake with barbs and had Ramsay the same way he had had her. Her fists tightened again as she imagined his screams and his pleas of mercy. How satisfying they would have been.

But the Lord Bolton had never begged or asked for forgiveness from neither his beloved wife or the gods themselves. He would never give anyone that satisfaction. He was an unrepentant monster that had soiled her innocence and darkened her soul. 

“I am a part of you now,” he had said, and he knew, oh he knew, that his sullied fingers had grasped onto more than her unwilling hips and flailing limbs. What he did not know was that the blackened part had taken root long before she knew the name Ramsay Bolton as true heir of the Dreadfort, long before she was stolen away from the Capital. It was a seedling there within her the day her father's head was taken off his shoulders as she watched. The day that young Sansa's beloved betrothed had grinned like a true lion about to devour its prey.

Every horror since only strengthened her, every betrayal only made the Queen of the North swear bloodier vengeance against those who had wronged her. What Ramsay had done, those violations of her body, only served to nourish that resolve. She had grown stronger, cleverer and more cunning thanks to the lessons from those around her, of which there had been many. 

She would thank Cersei for her tutelage before she had Brienne slit her throat.

As she sat in the snow, beneath her family's tree, before the old gods and the new, she vowed that this would be the shedding of the last pale coat of her innocence. His footsteps crunched through the fresh snowfall and she watched him emerge into the clearing. He had taken longer than she expected, perhaps to give her the illusion of space, a time for adjustment to this place that held her best and worst memories. Or perhaps word of how she had set starving hounds on her husband had already spread in whispers throughout the castle. Ramsay's screams certainly had.

Petyr's steps were timid and he was normally such a sure-footed man. Here, this sacred place of the old gods unfamiliar to those from the south, was hers. She had reclaimed this as she would reclaim the North in her name, and secure herself in a position that would mean no one could ever hurt or outwit her again. It was unfortunate that this man, this Littlefinger, was a necessity to her plan.

“What do you want?”

His eyes were narrow and he seemed wary. She supposed she looked childlike, wrapped head to toe in her cloak and hunkered down underneath the great weirwood. It used to please him to see her innocent and unsure, now she knew he expected the woman that that had verbally ripped the flesh from his bones in Molestown. The woman that rode beside him with the Knights of the Vale only hours earlier, leading the vanguard to the Battle of Winterfell.

His wariness would help her, but only if he thought he had the upper-hand. Sansa stood to face him and he came towards her as though she were the last water in a world of sand.

“I thought you knew what I wanted,” he spoke as if certain of her answer, but his eyes betrayed him.

At that moment she knew that this man who played kings and fooled kingdoms was hers and hers alone. Many times she had watched him around the most powerful men in the realm and many times she had seen his mask shift and shape; he could change his face in front of their very eyes and they would not notice. He was a master of the game. Somehow she, pure little Sansa of House Stark, had slipped beneath that facade.

Over the years she had glimpsed what she thought were true moments of honesty when the mask would fall for a heartbeat and she would see his true face. Even then she could not allow herself to believe that this, even those raw looks, were not part of Littlefinger's game to deceive her. To flatter her. To make her his. Certainly he had done that, but he had not intended to make a player in his own image. Sansa knew it amused him to watch her attempt to compete with the grown ups in this unending tourney without rules or honour, and she had been a diligent and eager student. His own hubris in that he was the champion of deceit and manipulation would be his downfall, but his skills would be hers to use as she pleased until then.

Now, as Petyr stood before her in her Father's family's godswood, his uncertain face inches from her own and his shallow breath misting the air in frequent clouds, she felt her stomach flip for the first time since she was a girl on the threshold of becoming Joffrey's beautiful, benevolent princess. This time Sansa recognised the low, heady swoop for what it was, not the dainty flutter of a naïve girl's dreams of kings and princes, but something else entirely. This was it, the feeling.

This was power.

Power, over the most powerful man in Westeros.

Her skin tingled, her creaking heart stirred and began to thump anew in her chest. She leaned in, savouring the fresh look of something akin to panic and not unlike victory in Petyr's eyes, inhaling the hint of staleness on his breath. She let her face relax into a hint of a smile.

“And what about what I want?”

“What do you want, my dear?” he whispered, his eyes fixed on her lips, his pupils blown wide and wild.

Her breath came faster to match his, to let him think he was the one that had keened her arousal, and not the intoxicating thought of the control she would wield. It would be in her best interest that he underestimates her. She thought once again of her throne, to being the true Queen of the North, to the impenetrable barrier she would erect around her kingdom and her heart, and her eyes fluttered closed.

She felt his gloved hand against her cheek, the soft cool leather heaven against her heated face and his voice was desperate, low, needing as he brought their faces so close their foreheads touched.

“Tell me, Sansa. What do you want?”

“Everything.”

And his mouth crashed down on hers. 


End file.
